Climate and vegetation water use efficiency at catchment scales

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (16) ◽  
pp. 2409-2414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Troch ◽  
Guillermo F. Martinez ◽  
Valentijn R. N. Pauwels ◽  
Matej Durcik ◽  
Murugesu Sivapalan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Water Use Efficiency ◽  
Water Use ◽  
Use Efficiency ◽  
Vegetation Water

scholarly journals Catchment-scale groundwater recharge and vegetation water use efficiency

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Troch ◽  
Ravindra Dwivedi ◽  
Tao Liu ◽  
Antonio Alves Meira Neto ◽  
Tirthankar Roy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Water Use Efficiency ◽  
Water Use ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Root Zone ◽  
Estimation Method ◽  
Catchment Scale ◽  
Use Efficiency ◽  
Vegetation Water ◽  
Recharge Rates

Abstract. Precipitation undergoes a two-step partitioning when it falls on the land surface. At the land surface and in the shallow subsurface, rainfall or snowmelt can either runoff as infiltration/saturation excess or quick subsurface flow. The rest will be stored temporarily in the root zone. From the root zone, water can leave the catchment as evapotranspiration or percolate further and recharge deep storage. It was recently shown that an index of vegetation water use efficiency, the Horton index (HI), could predict deep storage dynamics. Here we test this finding using 247 MOPEX catchments across the conterminous US. Our results show that the observed HI is indeed a reliable predictor of deep storage dynamics. We also find that the HI can reliably predict the long-term average recharge rate. Our results compare favorably with estimates of average recharge rates from the US Geological Survey. Previous research has shown that HI can be estimated based on aridity index, mean slope and mean elevation of a catchment (Voepel et al., 2011). We recalibrated Voepel’s model and used it to predict the HI for our catchments. We then used these predicted values of the HI to estimate average recharge rates for our catchments, and compared them with those estimated from observed HI. We find that the accuracies of our predictions based on observed and predicted HI are similar. This provides a novel estimation method of catchment-scale long-term average recharge rates based on simple catchment characteristics, such as climate and topography, and free of discharge measurements.

Increasing intrinsic water-use efficiency over the past 160 years does not stimulate tree growth in southeastern China

2018 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
G Guo ◽  
K Fang ◽  
J Li ◽  
HW Linderholm ◽  
D Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Water Use Efficiency ◽  
Water Use ◽  
Tree Growth ◽  
Southeastern China ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intrinsic Water Use Efficiency ◽  
Use Efficiency
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